A document, widely circulated online as the manifesto of Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, hints how he made money from crypto investments.

Brenton Tarrant, the Australian man behind today’s ghastly attack at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, reportedly made money from BitConnect investments.

49 people were confirmed dead by New Zealand police commissioner Mike Bush as of press time.

The death toll could rise further as the shooting, believed to be the worst the country has witnessed in recent history, left many survivors seriously wounded.

An Unconfirmed Manifesto

A document claimed to be the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter surfaced online shortly after the attack.

Titled “The Great Replacement: Towards A New Society” the 73-page manifesto features various details regarding who Brenton Tarrant is and what prompted him to carry out the heinous attack.

Among other things, the document portrays Tarrant as an “ordinary White man, 28 years old” who was “born in Australia to a working class, low-income family.”

Tarrant, believed to have authored the so-called manifesto, also added that he never opted for higher education as he “had no great interest in anything offered in the University to study.”

Instead, he worked for a while and made some investments in BitConnect. The manifesto reads:

“I worked for a short time before making some money investing in BitConnect, then used the money from the investment to travel.”

For those out of the loop, BitConnect was an open-source cryptocurrency and a peer-to-peer payment protocol connected with the bitconnect.co, a platform claiming to be a high-yield investment program.

BitConnect found itself at the receiving end of US law enforcement after the Texas State Securities Board issued a cease-and-desist notice alleging that the company was operating a Ponzi Scheme.

The charges brought against BitConnect included failure to disclose earnings as mandated by the law and filing inaccurate/misleading statements.

On Jan 17, 2018, BitConnect was officially shut down, causing the price of the cryptocurrency to plummet over 90%.

Note that Blokt can not independently verify the authenticity of the document. Our editorial team has decided against covering the rest of the manifesto because of its distasteful and disturbing content.

Nasdaq adds DeFi cryptocurrency index including Augur, MakerDAO, 0x

Nasdaq is adding a new index that is dedicated to blockchain projects in decentralized finance, featuring major cryptocurrencies such as Augur, Maker, and 0x.

EXANTE, a European investment services firm that was established in 2011 to offer global multi-asset financial services, partnered with the stock exchange operator Nasdaq to offer the Decentralized Finance Index (DeFix).

DeFix is the first index that reflects the real-time dynamics of six decentralized finance solutions, including Augur, Gnosis, Amoveo, Numerai, Maker, and 0x. It offers investors an opportunity to speculate in a collection of platforms that have the potential to disrupt the financial industry.

The index is going to be listed by Nasdaq under the ticker DEFX and it is already available to for tracking on the Nasdaq Global Index Data ServiceSM (GIDS) as well as other financial platforms such as TradingView and Google. Meanwhile, Yahoo Finance plans to list it in the near future.

This is not the first time Nasdaq is listing crypto-related indexes. In February, the U.S. stock exchange, through its data dissemination relationship with Brave New Coin, added indices for Bitcoin and Ethereum, the Bitcoin Liquid Index (BLX) and the Ethereum Liquid Index (ELX).

Later on, it included the XRP Liquid Index (XRPLX) to provide a real-time data for the price of 1 XRP, quoted in USD. Finally, Nasdaq’s Quandl platform announced a partnership with CryptoCompare to provide aggregate index datasets with up-to-date pricing data for the “most liquid” cryptocurrency markets.

Charles Hayter, co-founder and CEO at CryptoCompare, welcomed the association by stating that:

“WE ARE DELIGHTED TO PARTNER WITH NASDAQ ON A JOINT AGGREGATE CRYPTO REFERENCE PRICES PRODUCT. RELIABLE DATA IS THE BEDROCK OF TRANSPARENT, LIQUID MARKETS AND BY BRINGING OUR HIGH QUALITY, GRANULAR DATASET TO A GLOBAL INSTITUTIONAL CLIENT BASE, VIA THE QUANDL PLATFORM, WE WILL GIVE TRADERS AND INVESTORS A COMPETITIVE EDGE.”

Although cryptocurrencies aren’t tradeable on the Nasdaq at the moment, other established financial institutions are reportedly building cryptocurrency trading platforms.

Fidelity Investments, for instance, is launching a cryptocurrency trading service through Fidelity Digital Assets, according to a Bloomberg report. Bakkt, a subsidiary of the Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), which owns the New York Stock Exchange, is set to deploy the first physically-settled Bitcoin futures contracts in the market in the next two weeks.

Overall, it seems like cryptocurrency instruments are finally coming to the masses.

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Filed Under: U.S., Altcoins, DeFi, Trading

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After Ali began forex trading in 2012 In 2014, he came across Bitcoin’s whitepaper and was so fascinated by the idea of a decentralized, borderless, and censorship-resistant currency that he started buying Bitcoin. By 2015, he started traveling to spread the word about Bitcoin.

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New Decentralized Fiat-to-Crypto Gateway Launches on Ethereum Blockchain for Visa and Mastercard Users

A decentralized cryptocurrency exchange developed on the Ethereum blockchain by the creators of the Kyber Network is launching one of the first non-custodial fiat-to-crypto gateways.

KyberSwap is being introduced through a partnership with Coindirect, a Hong Kong-based crypto payment service provider backed by MakerDAO. The goal is to help anyone buy crypto with fiat more easily, with low fees of 3.5% by using Visa and Mastercard debit or credit cards.

According to the announcement, KyberSwap supports trading with Ether (ETH) and ERC20 compliant tokens, and is designed to be a fast, simple and secure DEX (decentralized exchange) for anyone, including totally new crypto users.

Key features

Fiat to crypto on-ramp

Fully on-chain token swaps

Non-custodial Limit Orders

iOS and Android mobile apps

Straightforward UI/UX

KyberSwap expects the new platform to spur adoption by eliminating complex KYC for small amounts and enabling the crypto curious.

“Imagine a curious user who wants to try DApps on Ethereum, and would like to start by buying a small amount e.g. 20 Euro worth of ETH. There aren’t many fast and convenient ways to do so. Coindirect allows small purchases of crypto, with just basic credit card information. Once the user is comfortable with crypto purchases and wants to increase his trade limit (~3000 Euro per day) and get even lower fees, he has the option to furnish more personal details.”

Bitcoin is trading below the opening price ($10,158) on Thursday. The bulls initially extended the leg above $10,200 resistance before a reversal swept in at $10,205.70). The chart I analyzed earlier today shows regression having been stopped slightly above $9,800 on Wednesday. The almost immediate bounce above $10,000 was supported by the ascending trendline further encouraging the buyers to regain control.

Ripple’s XRP, the third-largest digital asset with the current market capitalization of $10.8 billion, has recovered from the intraday low of $0.2211 and settled at $0.2530 by the time of writing. Despite the recovery, XRP/USD stays down 1.4% on a day-on-day basis.

NEO has been sidelined below $9.00 handle. The 20th largest digital asset with the current market value of $628 million has gained nearly 2% since the beginning of the day and stayed unchanged on a day-on-day basis. NEO is most actively traded at Bitfinex against USDT. From the longer-term perspective, the coin peaked at $24.04 on June 26 and has been moving within a downside trend ever since